Poet at The Proms.

I remember him at The Proms,
The North of Ireland man
Hooked on poetry and Bruckner,
A squat figure among excited fans.

We talked of farms and guns,
The hard labour of digging turf and spuds,
The slow long trudge for water.

It seemed so strange to me, a city fellow,
That a blunt spoken, solid country man
Should live his life for words,
And put by rugged toil for pen and paper.

But now, more than fifty long years later,
I read his books to learn more of the art
That I part share with him, though in a smaller measure
Than that rich crop of sayings, deeds and legends
That he gleaned from the fields of Ulster,
The back yards of Belfast, the rage in the Derry streets.

If I had known, as we talked beside the fountain
Waiting for the baton to be lifted,
The orchestra to thunder,
That I was chatting to a king of words
Who would one day carve the clay of language
Into a brand new music,
An epiphany of saying,
I would have pinned back hard my teenage ears
And listened to him with a greater care
Than I bestowed on Bruckner,
And would perhaps not have been quite so casual
About things I claimed to know.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 14th. - 23rd. 2017.